Venezuela sought to open a new front in its months-long verbal assault on the U.S. shale oil industry on Wednesday, suggesting it posed a grave threat to water supplies.
In the latest criticism of the hydraulic fracturing technology that has yielded a gusher of crude supplies in Venezuela's biggest oil market, oil minister Asdrubal Chavez cited the "huge environmental impact" from shale.
"This does not seem to raise any concerns among the governments promoting it or the companies involved," he told an OPEC seminar in Vienna attended by chief executives of some of the world's biggest oil companies, including Exxon and BP, both of which operate in U.S. shale.
"It is a responsibility of the conventional crude oil-producing countries to develop price mechanisms that take into account these economic and geopolitical actors that promote technologies that threaten the availability of the fundamental resource for human existence: water."
The comments echo those of environmental activists in the United States who have questioned both the extensive amount of water that must be injected into shale wells, and also the risk that the chemical-laced mixes used in fracking could seep into groundwater.
The issue is a difficult one for scientists because in many places data on water quality has rarely been taken before the energy extraction began.
After years of study, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expected soon to release a landmark report on the possible impact of fracking on drinking water. Other existing research has failed to identify any systemic problems, although a handful of reported incidents have raised public concerns.
The comments from Venezuela are its latest broadside against the rise of an industry that is widely cited for tipping the world's oil market into oversupply and precipitating a collapse in oil prices that has slammed the increasingly cash-strapped and unpopular government in the midst of a deep recession.
Chavez blamed fracking for creating an "involuntary price war among oil-producing brother countries".
President Nicolas Maduro has for months alleged that the United States is deliberately flooding the market with shale oil to sink prices and destabilise his OPEC nation, whose crude shipments to U.S. refiners have halved over the past decade.
Chavez also urged the group to be more vigilant about emerging threats to its power, calling for the creation of a technical group involving OPEC and non-OPEC market experts to avoid any future unpleasant surprises.
"As this technology was advancing, OPEC and non-OPEC countries did not have the early warnings that could have allowed us to implement strategies capable of countering the negative effects of shale oil," he said.
Despite waving the flag of environmentalism, Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA has faced criticism on that same front over problems including a sizable 2012 oil spill that affected a river in eastern Venezuela and a large pile of petroleum coke, and also uses fracking in some of its own operations.
Senior PDVSA executives reject environmental criticism as being exaggerated, ill-informed and politically motivated by enemies of the socialist government.
